From Milton Keynes to Paula Rego

Just around the corner from the Milton Keynes Art Gallery. Note the artificial grass.

I had not visited the Milton Keynes art gallery before, and the Paula Rego exhibition was powerful event. Perhaps what contributed to the dramatic was the uninspiring surroundings. Outside, the world was mundane, thoughtless, trivial. Inside, an art that meant something, that was committed, that was serious.

The Milton Keynes Gallery is situated in the corner of the shopping precinct. This is a rectangular block, surrounded by car parking, with all the usual retail offerings. It being Saturday, the centre was crowded. We parked the other side of the block and walked through a curved walkway (curved for no reason) that comprised nothing but bars and restaurants. There was artificial grass in places and zero architectural merit.

The gallery is situated next to the theatre, which has a pointless canopy in front of it, shielding nothing from the rain. The gallery has a café which, when we visited it, was busy selling burgers to customers that seemed to have more connection with the shops than with the gallery. We sat outside and stared at the traffic going past. It was not a pretty sight.

View from the Gallery Cafe

Yet the exhibition was such a contrast! Here was an artist for whom painting was a serious commitment – from the earliest works on show, she was unafraid to condemn practices and regimes she thought unacceptable. The early pictures were full of unintelligible references and not very well composed, but by the second room, she was starting to become more confident in her art and to learn the very distinctive characteristic of good drawing combined with an almost cartoon-like outline to her characters – well-drawn figures, often combined with narrative. The closest parallel might be some work by Picasso, but utterly different in intent. For Rego, the public became the personal, in a kind of enabling way. While her treatment of fairy tales is remarkable and totally individual, she never makes you feel that her interpretation is private and privileged; you feel you are encouraged to have your own, equally valid, interpretations. She reverses the usual male-female roles, so you see dominant females and tyrannised males. But this is done with splendid technique, so that even a work condemning female circumcision is executed with the highest quality of capturing rounded and solid bodies – human or models. There is a real volume to these figures. Rego has that in common with Euan Uglow and Lucian Freud – the ability to draw volume.

Impaled, 2008

By the quality of her drawing, Rego pulls you into her world, so that you want to know how and why she reinterprets stories such as The Crime of Father Amaro, or a Balzac short story. It seems perfectly acceptable, for example, to invent scenes from Eca de Queiros that are not in the original at all; you want to hear her interpretation. When she reinterprets fairy tales and nursery rhymes, her versions are not for children; they make you question and revisit the original.

In all, a remarkable show by a remarkable woman. To be a student in the misogynist 1950s and to survive and become a powerful artist in her own right was an achievement in itself, but to recreate narrative art when representative art had almost disappeared, to fearlessly invent new genres, to be unafraid to look at older art and to reinterpret it in her own way – the wonderful example is The Dream of St Joseph, based on a Philippe de Champaigne original in the National Gallery – is truly astonishing.

Philippe de Champaigne, Dream of St Joseph, 1642

In the original (1642), St Joseph, Christ’s earthly father, learns in a dream that Mary’s child is divine. Rego transforms this orthodox moment in Christian doctrine to a powerful celebration of female creativity, into a woman creating images from the man’s dream. The Virgin is transformed from passive to active artist. The artist makes the dream happen – now the angel is shown on the artist’s canvas. In other words, a divine intervention becomes the sublime moment when an artist creates a vision, and creates the dreams for the male subject.

Joseph's Dream, After Philippe de Champaigne, 1990

If the reinterpretation of the narrative were all there was, the picture would still be remarkable, but what makes the work astounding is the quality of the drawing. Rego’s depiction of the painter/Virgin is positioned, not as in the original, but a gorgeous, powerful bending forward; this is a posture adopted by a creative artist at work, building visions. An insipid Baroque painting turned into a dramatic celebration of earthly creativity.